So, I have finally got my toolbars the colour I want, but the few icons are stark white and they and the legends all sit in black boxes. I can't find the right buzzwords to lead me to the answer, even assuming there is one. Any ideas?

But what a shambles! First, the default install scrambled some of the character set, rendering some letters correctly but others, such as 'e' as blocky blobs. Switching to Gnome Classic fixed that.

Then, no System menu - until I find its options munged into the Applications menu. Except, dear Gnomes, did anybody tell you that most of those system settings are not Apps? Now, I know that you regard your users as uninformed and unintelligent over things systemic and barely able to read, but isn't that precisely why you should avoid presenting system GUI apps as user activity apps?

And customising the desktop. The background and the theme and different bits of the toolbar customisation all set in wildly different parts of the forest, those system settings sure are "out of the user's way". Look you Gnome guys, the idea of focusing on UX is to get the geeky system tweaking out of the user's way, not to get the simple UX choices out of the user's way!

If this had been a smartphone or a tablet, I'd have flushed it down the lavvy in disgust by now. Truly a step backwards almost comparable to Windows 8 (TM).

Apparently Linus is back onto Gnome. What does he know that I don't?

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

When I upgraded from Squeeze to Wheezy, the Gnome desktop tried to load, flickered, then switched to "classic." There was a notification balloon to tell me why, but it was positioned partly off-screen so I'm still none the wiser. So I didn't get to try Gnome's Hell (or however it's supposed to be typed), but the "classic" is anything but a classic.

Thankfully I found a bug-fix: XFCE is fast, stable and extremely customisable - a lot like Gnome was ten years ago in fact! All I had to do then was replace GDM3 with GDM2 (which was a lot easier than I'd thought), reinstate 3-button emulation in X.org, and the desktop was as good as it was in Squeeze!

This raises a question: How many of the recent changes in the big Linux desktops were actually proposed by Microsoft moles?

I've just read somewhere, possibly in LXF, that Debian 8 ('Jessie') is proposing to defect to XFCE. I recently installed Debian 7 because I had liked Debian 6 and its default desktop - my first thought upon trying to use Debian 7, not unlike the first time I saw Windows 8, was... 'what on earth were they thinking when they did this?'

Just settling into a new fedora 20 install with Gnome 3 and MATE will be adding KDE and XFCE when I figure out how to add a local repro from the install DVD on a cellular dongle for connectivity so trying to minimize the downloading and with fedora's delta RPMs it sure saves on bandwidth.